In the past, attempts to manipulate certain supple, irregularly shaped materials to facilitate their mass production have encountered a number of difficulties. Tortillas, for example, being a mixture of corn flour and water, are very supple and tend to come apart easily, and, although typically they are said to be generally round in shape, actually they are dimensionally quite irregular. A method of producing such materials is to prepare the dough, extrude it, transport the raw tortillas by means of a conveyor belt into an oven, and there cook the tortillas which are then dried and cooled in a cooler. It is from this point on that the invention herein described is particularly applicable, because in the cooked state such torttillas have proved to be very difficult to handle using automatic machinery. This is because in the condition that they are in when they are discharged from the cooler, they are not susceptible to being manipulated by being pushed or slid because, in physical characteristics they are somewhat similar to a flat piece of soft rubber, about 0.25 cm. thick and approximately 10-15 cm. across and have a tendency to bunch up, wrinkle, and overlay themselves. Typically, by this point in the process no matter how regular the intervals at which the raw material has been admitted to the process, they will be discharged at irregular intervals, sometimes even overlapping each other, because some may have shifted or gotten caught on objects as they pass through the ovens and cooler, or for other reasons. Because of their physical characteristics, and particularly their propensity to pull apart, it is extremely difficult to untangle them and synchronize them mechanically, utilizing apparatus or techniques which are typically applied to handling other types of foodstuffs and objects, such as cans, or other less supple objects, which may be placed in desired positions by use of bumpers, flanges, levers, or other mechanisms which are brought to bear on the edges or other surfaces of the objects as a means to push them into position. With materials having physical characteristics such as those of a tortilla, the use of such apparatus or techniques frequently results in the material merely doubling up or wadding. However, to avoid excessive hand labor, it is desired to synchronize such objects positionally so that they may be further handled by automatic machinery, and to provide such automatic machinery so that they may be stacked or otherwise grouped in preparation for packaging.
Accordingly, it is an object of this invention to provide a means for synchronizing the position of flat, irregularly shaped objects, particularly where such objects are supple and/or have limited ability to resist being pulled apart.
It is another object of this invention to provide such means suitable for use with other apparatus for further handling such objects.
Yet another object of this invention is to provide such apparatus in combination with stacking apparatus.